Schrader, arguably the most original mind of New Hollywood, had never seen the films that influenced Spielberg. Raised by Calvinist fundamentalists, he skipped junk film entirely: his heroes were ascetics like Robert Bresson, Yasujiro Ozu and Carl Dreyer. However, once Spielberg began describing the international network of UFOlogists and their struggle to convince officialdom, Schrader’s fascination with morally driven characters was engaged.
One of the leading investigators, J. Allen Hynek, had begun investigating UFOs for the US Air Force. After discounting 80 per cent of sightings, he was left with a residue of genuinely inexplicable phenomena. Inspired by Hynek, Schrader drafted a script, called variously ‘Pilgrim’ and ‘Kingdom Come’, about Paul VanOwen, a sceptical federal agent converted by what Hynek called a ‘close encounter of the third kind’ – physical contact with aliens, as opposed to lights in the sky or signs of a landing. He persuades the government to fund a fifteen-year investigation of the phenomenon, only to find, in Schrader’s words, ‘that the key to making contact isn’t out there in the universe, but implanted inside him’.
After one Sunday at the Phillipses’, Spielberg stopped his car in the middle of the night on Mulholland Drive, the road that weaves sinuously along the ridge between Los Angeles and the Valley. Climbing out, he flopped on his back across the bonnet to gape at the night sky. Tilting his head, he saw the Valley’s net of light inverted, spread out above his head, as if the constellations had suddenly arranged themselves in orderly lines of red, green and diamond white. He was no longer looking down on a city but up at… something else: a space ship so huge that it filled the sky?
Now at least he knew what the UFO film would look like. He was less sure what it was about.
In October 1972, Goldie Hawn had signed a three-film deal with Universal. Her career, which soared after she left TV’s comedy Laugh In to win a 1969 Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her first film, Cactus Flower, had slumped with a Warren Beatty thriller, enigmatically called $s, and the comedy Butterflies are Free. Zanuck suggested her as Lou Jean Poplin in Sugarland Express. Hawn wanted to ditch her ditzy image, and Spielberg was happy to agree. She signed in December.
Julia Phillips in her autobiography harps on Hawn’s scruffy style and dirty hair, but to Spielberg these were her charm. She became the model for the tousled, untidy women of all his films: Close Encounters’s Melinda Dillon, sleepy in T-shirt and cut-offs; tomboyish Karen Allen and Kate Capshaw in two Indiana Jones films; Holly Hunter in Always; harassed mum Dee Wallace in E.T.; Laura Dern in Jurassic Park; Julia Roberts’s Tinkerbell in Hook. All fit the ‘younger sister/older brother’ model with which Spielberg characterised his romantic relationships. Mostly sexless, these women in his films live for and through their children or boyish men. Femininity is a reward conferred by their lovers, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Color Purple, Always and Hook, women don ‘girl clothes’ as a sign of desirability. ‘It’s not the clothes,’ sighs Holly Hunter deliriously in Always when Richard Dreyfuss presents her with a cocktail dress and high heels, ‘it’s the way you see me.’
For Spielberg, as for many directors, the erotic gratification of shooting films transcended sex. ‘When I’m making a movie I become celibate,’ he has said. ‘I get into the routine of fucking my movie.’ (He also avoided seeing other films at such times, fearful, he says, of his work being impregnated by the ideas of others.) He deprecated those film-makers preoccupied with ‘sport fucking’. ‘Location shooting is the Rites of Spring to most film crews,’ he said. ‘Holiday Inns across America are probably host to more sprung beds and screaming orgasms when a movie company comes to town than at any other time.’
Spielberg lost his virginity at seventeen in a Holiday Inn motel – ‘With a creature,’ he joked, in the wake of E.T., ‘that was anything but extraterrestrial.’ During his days at Universal, he dated regularly, encouraged by the more aggressive De Palma, who made the pick-ups and set the pace. When Spielberg finagled one of the first portable phones out of the studio, he and De Palma enjoyed calling girls from their driveways to ask for a date, then ringing the doorbell half a minute later. De Palma, an enthusiast for voyeurism and porn, both of which are recurring themes in his films, shot all their excursions on the 16mm camera he always carried. Their conquests were mostly starlets as low in the pecking order as themselves. Spielberg briefly tangled with Sarah Miles, and with striking Hispanic Victoria Principal, but neither relationship was exactly serious. Miles was no stranger to romance, and the later star of Dallas was so nakedly ambitious that she founded her own talent agency and blitzed casting directors with head shots and resumes of its favourite client: herself. Spielberg later ruefully rated her ‘a great mind trapped in a great body’.
‘Spielberg has always surrounded himself with women,’ Martin Amis observed. ‘Surrogate aunts, mothers, kid sisters.’ But he recoiled from relationships which might have forced him to assume responsibility for another’s emotional well-being. Actresses never posed that problem. They were too self-absorbed for more than a passing involvement. But that cut both ways. An actress offered no reassurance or consolation when Hollywood turned and savaged you. ‘You can’t cry on a shoulder that’s wearing a shoulder pad,’ Spielberg told one friend revealingly.
On 14 December 1972, just a few days before Spielberg’s twenty-fifth birthday, Universal printed out the red-covered Final Screenplay of The Sugarland Express. Shooting would begin on 8 January 1973 near San Antonio. Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins took sole writing credit, from Spielberg’s original story, but because of his intensive observation and discussion of the script during writing, Spielberg’s signature was on almost every scene.
Scarfing up the remains of the youth boom, Warners and United Artists had also put films into pre-production about young outlaw lovers. Badlands, directed by another newcomer, Terrence Malick, a Rhodes Scholar and Harvard graduate with a convincing line of intellectual chat, was based on the 1958 plains states murders committed by Charlie Starkweather and his fourteen-year-old girlfriend, while Robert Altman’s Thieves Like Us retold a Bonnie and Clyde story against a rural Depression background. Though both promised to be radically different in tone to Sugarland, Universal was nervous about so much competition. Spielberg didn’t care. Scouting locations, he was already thinking about ‘Watch the Skies’, as the UFO film was now called. Visiting Texas with Mike Fenton and Shari Rhodes to cast small roles for Sugarland, he’d earmarked some isolated airfields for what he told columnist Archer Winsten would be ‘an Air Force picture shrouded in science fiction’.
During this trip, Spielberg experienced a close encounter of his own that was to have far-reaching effects on his work. He found himself in a remote, old-fashioned hotel in Jefferson, Texas, with Diane Bucker, head of the Texas Film Commission, and Elliot Schick, the film’s production manager (and later producer of The Deer Hunter). Around midnight, as he undressed, he kept glimpsing a figure from the comer of his eye, though it disappeared as he tried to focus on it. A moment later, the entire room went cold, especially around the four-poster bed. Panicked, Spielberg roused the others and, pausing only to snap some flash pictures, fled. Bucker’s new Mercedes refused to start, so a mechanic was called. Once he had it going at 1.30 a.m., they drove sixty miles to the comforting anonymity of a Holiday Inn. Spielberg disavows any belief in the supernatural, putting such phenomena down to the power of suggestion. What the incident most resembles, in his retelling, is a movie, and in particular a favourite of his, Robert Wise’s 1963 version of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, which he called The Haunting. True to form, Spielberg recycled the experience in Poltergeist, another demonstration that in his universe everything, even the incorporeal, aspires to the condition of film.
As shooting loomed on Sugarland, he began choosing his team. He persuaded Verna Fields to take leave from USC to edit. Carey Loftin again planned the stunts, using one of the Corvettes he and Max Balchowski rebuilt as camera cars for Bullitt. Finding a cameraman was harder. Since he’d be shooting in winter, and on the open road, often in bad light, Spielberg needed the best. ‘Visually wooed,’ he said, ‘by the thought of all those cars,’ he wanted, as on Duel, to put his